Agreed. SUS is Microsoft's solution, especially since WUS has been delayed, which works through Automatic Updates (you can specify what SUS system to connect your workstations/servers to). There are also products like HFNetChkPro from Shavlik and UpdateExpert from St. Bernard to handle patch management. In addition, the security patches can be downloaded and deployed using scripts. In reality, this is how the patch management programs do it. It is not a requirement to have IE to update patches.

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